Klein On Teacher Quality

Joel Klein’s testimony to Congress is worth checking out, more Aspen than “crap”…

Unfortunately, by focusing exclusively on credentials in defining a “highly qualified” teacher, NCLB abandons teacher quality at the classroom door. We need to ensure that we hire qualified teachers, but we also need to ask whether those teachers are actually helping students learn.

When I testified before this committee last year, I told you that in an age of technology, educators no longer have to guess what a student’s problem is and experiment until they find the right solution. Well, schools no longer have to guess about teacher quality, either. It is something we can and should measure. I hope the next version of NCLB will motivate schools
to do this, just as we’re doing it in New York City.